Film programme
EMAF’s film programmes are developed in collaboration with international curators, artists and theorists who, as members of the programming team, select the contributions for competition and feature film programmes, or are invited to develop their own thematic programmes and series.
International Competition and Feature Films
31 short films can be seen in this year’s International Selection, while the Feature Films section includes four current feature-length works that enter into dialogue with five films from the 1980s and 90s. The works being shown are by renowned and up-and-coming artists from all over the world, with many of them showing in Germany for the first time. In numerous films, we encounter gestures of rebellion and resistance against lasting injustice and social inequality. Artists play with different film genres, primarily with elements of horror and suspense, which may relate to their disquiet about the present. Another central motif is the renewed search for personal and political stories in direct conversation, but also in encounters with places and landscapes. More or less untamed nature - gardens, parks, the rainforest - repeatedly appears as a historical location, personal anchor point or utopian design for another form of living together.
We sing to wing again
What can art and film do or say while we follow how a genocide is being carried out on a live stream while those responsible go unpunished? The film programme curated by Colombian artist Laura Huertas Millán on the theme of Witnessing Witnessing examines a series of different artistic practices that revolve around memory, the corporeality of resistance and performance as a somatic archive for passing down history. Inspired by a verse by poet Hoa Nguyen, the title of the series We sing to wing again references the never-ending cycles of colonial violence, the breaking of oppressive silence, bearing witness, and sheltering hope. The series includes short films by artists from five decades.
Artists in Focus
We’re very happy to be able to welcome New Red Order (NRO) as this year’s Artists in Focus - or NRO and Co. to be more precise, as films by main members of the group Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) will also be accompanied by works that were made in other constellations. In films, installations, performances and collective projects, NRO confront settler-colonialist society, articulating its foundation within the desires for Indigeneity alongside the violent displacement of Indigenous land and life. In their film works, they make use of the languages of genre cinema, experimental cinema, advertising films and manifestos, further combining them with humour, sincerity and conscientious research in order to expand our political imagination and to highlight paths towards a liveable future.
SPECTRAL
This year too, the LaborBerlin collective will present the diversity of analogue film practice as part of SPECTRAL. A central work of this year’s presentation is the reconstruction of a multi-projector performance that Takahiko limura, a pioneer of expanded cinema in Japan, developed together with composer Alvin Lucier. Thanks to LaborBerlin’s collaboration with curator Julian Ross and the researchers of Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the performance will be seen again for the first time since the 1960s. In addition, expanded cinema performances and installations made in the last three years as part of a residency programme will be presented under the title S.P.A.C.E. EXPANDED. They all activate the projection space in specific fashion and transform it into a place of shared experience.
EMAF Extended
After the festival, Dimitris Athiridis’ documentary exergue - on documenta 14 (2024) will be screened alongside the EMAF exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The film accompanies the artistic director of documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, and his curatorial team as they plan and realise one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art, which for the first time took place in Kassel and Athens in 2017. This decision, which was part of the curatorial concept of documenta 14, sparked controversy in advance and ended with a budget deficit and a media scandal. In 14 chapters, exergue offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at contemporary art production, exploring the tensions between curatorial work and institutional structures, local funding and the global art market, and the role of contemporary art in a changing political landscape.
Exhibition
How does bearing witness become visible, audible, experienceable? How do we shape memories and truths through the things we bear witness to? The artists of the exhibition work with film documentation, oral history, archives and court witness statements, assemble forensic experts, analyse material and media traces and examine the very process of testifying as an active, performative practice along the way.
The artists grapple with bearing witness as a moral, political and emotional act that is also a process. They reflect on whose testimonies are perceived and in which way. In so doing, they shine a light on the responsibility and power relations connected to bearing witness and the representation of events.
Talks
When witnesses of violence and injustice go unheard, where are the things that happened registered, where are they stored? How can testimonies given write stories that have not yet been written and break the power of a systematic lack of knowledge that secures privileges within society?
Bearing witness is itself caught up in epistemic violence: I only see what I know, recognise, have learnt to recognise. Taking the National Socialist Underground complex as its starting point, Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s Was ich noch nicht erkenne, jetzt in diesem Moment (2023) describes collective ignorance as the basis of structural racism and contrasts this with the self-assertion of migrant-situated experience and memory. The title of this year’s Talks I could swear my face was touching stone picks up on the affective aspects of testimony. It is taken from the poetry collection Land to Light On (1997) by Canadian writer Dionne Brand. Brand’s poetry has repeatedly engaged with the question of testimony, with the gap between what is inflicted and what of that is reported.
Before this backdrop, the four events are dedicated to the transhistorical dimension of witnessing as well as corporeal and sensorial forms of knowledge, with those taking part linking together short presentations, conversations, readings and films. Film scholars Anaïs Farine and Irit Neidhardt discuss the history of the production and (re-appropriation of images from Palestine. Author and philologist Sanabel Abdel Rahman and artist and researcher Ashkan Sepahvand speak about witnesses who use fabulation to pierce through colonial reality. Legal and Islamic studies scholar Nahed Samour and artist Anita Di Bianco interrogate both media and legal lines of fracture in order to make them recognisable as continuities. To conclude the series, author and curator José B. Segebre and Ashkan Sepahvand take an in-depth look at waiting and dying bodies as aesthetic strategies in decolonial, intersectional queer feminist art practice and AIDS activism.
Curated and moderated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marc Siegel, Philip Widmann and Florian Wüst.
Campus
In the festival section Campus, classes and subject groups from art schools and universities present their current work. Students from Helsinki, Szczecin, Braunschweig and Osnabrück are our guests at this year’s EMAF and will be showing the fruits of their labour in exhibitions, film programmes and performances at the festival cinemas and selected venues in the centre of Osnabrück.
The HBK Braunschweig exhibition presents works by students of fine art and art pedagogy. Films, videos, sculptures, performances and installations examine the connection between individual experiences and social and political contexts, focussing on different perspectives on questions of witnessing.
It Will Be a Very Difficult Conversation is a short film by students from the Academy of Art in Szczecin which seeks to express what we lack words for in everyday life: how do we engage with conflicts in our immediate surroundings? How can I produce critical art that perhaps leads to restrictions for those closest to me? How do I manage when a war splits the community that I come from?
In their film and performance event Ensemble, students of the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki explore fundamental questions relating to the shared experience of images and spaces. For a limited period, doors open that lead us to a home, to the sea or to the surface of skin. Voices, soundscapes and the light of the projectors lead the audience into the space and the time of their imagination.
The Institute for Art/Art Pedagogy at the Osnabrück University is participating with works created in collaboration with different artists. They seek to make us aware of human boundaries in information processing and the psychological and social effects of false information and information saturation.
Students from the media laboratory at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences are presenting projects that draw on virtual reality, Al or physical computing to engage with the strategies of political manipulation, the modelling and tactile exploration of landscape and new forms of playful interaction.
At the Department for Everyday Records established by the Music and Art School Osnabrück, the citizen’s personal records are systematically administered and ordered by staff. Personal everyday records such as notes, receipts or contact lens packets can be handed in by citizens at the relevant office.
